For a certain writer at Quadrant

Embarrassing

I've just discovered, while googling my name for a work related purpose, that a young man from England has a twitter account in my name.  His tweets indicate he may well run the most boring twitter account in the universe, as it comprises mainly of short complaints:  "it's so cold today, hate this weather"  "when's my next pay rise?"  "I wish I was on holiday again".  To break up the monotony, there is the occasional "great time last night".  But it's nearly completely devoid of information. 

Come on, lad:   a namesake of me has to be more interesting.  And stop smoking.  (He thanked his Mum for a gift of fags.  D'oh.)

Fish to the foreground

Farmed fish overtakes farmed beef for first time - life - 19 June 2013 - New Scientist

It's just - interesting...ok?

Bringing back Zeus

BBC News - The Greeks who worship the ancient gods

I hope they draw the line at temple prostitutes, nude olympics, and pederasts ceremonially chasing boys, though. 

Some Friday weirdness for you

Yowie sighted at Bexhill - witness asks to stay anonymous | Northern Star

An anonymous, but interesting, claim of a recent yowie sighting in Northern New South Wales.  

Local science makes me proud

Catalyst: Dengue Fever - ABC TV Science

I was very impressed with the state of science in Queensland as shown on Catalyst last night.  

The first story was about the promising looking plan to replace dangerous mosquitoes in Cairns with bred ones that will not carry the dangerous Dengue Fever.  

You can watch the video at the link (or see a transcript.)

The second story was about scramjet research based a the University of Queensland.  They've been plugging away at this for a long time, but still seem to be making advances.  

The story is not yet up on the Catalyst website, but I'll link to it when it is.

Tony loves Gina

   

As inspired by Malcolm Farr's story today which should have been titled "How the Coalition plans a complete suck up to Gina Rinehart."

Quick and early success with vaccination

Sexually transmitted HPV declines in US teens

Since a vaccine against HPV was introduced in 2006, 56 percent fewer girls age 14-19 have become infected, said the research announced by the US Centers for Disease Control and published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

CDC Director Tom Frieden described the findings as a "wake-up call" that the vaccine works and should be more widely used. Currently, about one-third of girls age 13-17 are fully vaccinated.

 I wonder what percentage of 14 to 19 year old girls were formerly infected, though.  Certainly, go a bit older and the figures are big:

The CDC says about 79 million Americans, most in their late teens and early 20s, are infected with HPV, and every year some 14 million people become newly infected.

Hot where it counts

All-Time Heat Records Broken in . . . Alaska?! | Climate Central

It hasn't had attention in the Australian media, as far as I know, but recently Alaska has been having all time record heat, even while England continues with another wet and cool summer (and possibly may have more in the coming years.)

Someone in a comment somewhere on the net said it reminded them of chaos theory, which suggested some systems go through swings from one extreme to another until they settle into a new state.   That did ring a bell with me too.

The criteria as defined by Catallaxy

As far as I can tell, the main criteria by which Sinclair Davidson, Judith Sloan and others who post at Catallaxy for an economist to run Treasury (or the Productivity Commission) is that they have never been identified as expressing belief in, or have worked on, matters relating to environmental causes, and climate change in particular. 

Hence, Davidson says Treasury all started to go wrong when Ken Henry came in back in 2007.  

Of course, one would think that an economist who went out hard on a stagflation warning two years ago might be more circumspect in criticising Treasury for getting their recent years forecasts wrong, but no...

Awesome

More data storage? Here's how to fit 1,000 terabytes on a DVD

In The Conversation today:

 In Nature Communications today, we, along with Richard Evans from CSIRO, show how we developed a new technique to enable the data capacity of a single DVD to increase from 4.7 gigabytes up to one petabyte (1,000 terabytes). This is equivalent of 10.6 years of compressed high-definition video or 50,000 full high-definition movies.

They also point out:

 Some 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years.

Their two light beam technique, which reduces the "dot" size when burning a DVD, is said to be:

...cost-effective and portable, as only conventional optical and laser elements are use, and allows for the development of optical data storage with long life and low energy consumption, which could be an ideal platform for a Big Data centre.

I'm not sure if that means it won't be turning up on a home PC, but still, it sounds a remarkable advance.

The Age tries comedy

(As inspired by this story in The Age this morning: Abbott, the thinking person's prime minister.)

No Bond gadgets needed?

Uri Geller psychic spy? The spoon-bender's secret life as a Mossad and CIA agent revealed - Features - Films - The Independent

This sounds very improbable, but interesting:

We may know him for spoon bending antics and for his lengthy friendship with pop star Michael Jackson but showbiz psychic Uri Geller has seemingly had a lengthy second career as a secret agent for Mossad and the CIA, albeit one that was more Austin Powers than James Bond.

Geller was at the Sheffield Doc Fest this week for the premiere of Vikram Jayanti’s The Secret Life Of Uri Geller – Psychic Spy?, a new film that offers compelling evidence of his involvement in the shadowy world of espionage.

“Uri has a controversial reputation. A lot of people think he is a fraud, a lot of people think he is a trickster and makes things up but at the same time he has a huge following and a history of doing things that nobody can explain,” Jayanti says of his Zelig-like subject....

 The doc leaves a question mark in its title but provides so much background evidence that we are left in little doubt that even its most outlandish assertions are rooted in truth. Whether or not Geller had psychic powers, US security forces were certainly prepared to take a very hefty wager on him.

The documentary doesn't just rely on Geller's claims (in fact it says he is guarded in what he says):

Jayanti didn’t rely on Geller’s own cryptic testimony. Instead, he spoke to the high-level officials involved in recruiting and using him. These include scientists from The Stanford Research Institute as well as senior CIA operatives. Among the interviewees with first hand knowledge of Geller’s psychic spying activities are former CIA officer Kit Green, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell (the sixth man to walk on the moon), physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, and retired US army colonel John Alexander (of The Men Who Stared At Goats fame). A Brit, Nick Pope, once the British Government’s UFO boffin, also puts in an appearance. 

Hmmm.  Given that most of those named are prominent as believers in the paranormal, I wonder how reliable some their testimony might be.

Anyway, sounds well worth watching.

A comment made in absentia

I have a comment awaiting moderation for Catallaxy, where Julie Novak has attempted to answer the question "why are there no libertarian countries":

* Julie may well have read of this article elsewhere (it was getting a lot of publicity in the US), but I was the first to raise it at Catallaxy in an open thread some days ago. It attracted little comment, apart from the “just piss off” variety, and daddy dave accused it of being deliberately provocative to dare raise it at a libertarian themed site (even though, as many others now point out, the threads are dominated by conservatives.) This is an example of the completely out of whack treatment yours truly receives at the blog – it was an interesting argument well deserving of comment, but because I am the one to raise it, I am the one who deserves punishment.

* Isn’t it gob smackingly ironic for the complaints at this blog regarding the alleged crushing nanny statism which Australians are suffering under that Julie is citing recent research ranking the country high in the matters of economic and personal freedoms? I haven’t been able to download the paper at the link, but people who can should perhaps explain why it doesn’t support my contention that the blog is full of exaggerating panic merchants?

Oh, boo hoo

Of course, confirming that the Labor politicians who are still fighting the war for a Rudd return are not quite right in the head, Doug Cameron and Kim Carr have lined up to pretty directly condemn Gillard for seeing that Crossin loses her job.

But quite frankly, that's politics, isn't it?   People sometimes lose pre-selection for someone they think less deserving.

And after all - it's not as if Crossin hasn't had a good run.  In the Senate since 1998, and what sort of pension will she retire on?:

TERRITORIANS shouldn't feel too sorry for Trish Crossin following her dumping from the Senate.
She will get an annual tax-free pension of more than $100,000 a year and five free business class flights a year.

Oh, it's a right tragedy for her, that is.

Lift cables, skyscrapers, and space

Lifts and skyscrapers: The other mile-high club | The Economist

Here's another interesting piece up at The Economist website:

This week Kone, a Finnish liftmaker, announced that after a decade of development at its laboratory in Lohja, which sits above a 333-metre-deep mineshaft which the firm uses as a test bed, it has devised a system that should be able to raise an elevator a kilometre (3,300 feet) or more. This is twice as far as the things can go at present. Since the effectiveness of lifts is one of the main constraints on the height of buildings, Kone’s technology—which replaces the steel cables from which lift cars are currently suspended with ones made of carbon fibres—could result in buildings truly worthy of the name “skyscraper”.

The problem with steel cables (or “ropes” as they are known in the trade) is that they are heavy. Any given bit of rope has to pull up not only the car and the flexible travelling cables that take electricity and communications to it, but also all the rope beneath it. The job is made easier by counterweights. But even so in a lift 500 metres tall (the maximum effective height at the moment) steel ropes account for up to three-quarters of the moving mass of the machine. Shifting this mass takes energy, so taller lifts are more expensive to run. And adding to the mass, by making the ropes longer, would soon come uncomfortably close to the point where the steel would snap under the load. Kone says it is able to reduce the weight of lift ropes by around 90% with its carbon-fibre replacement, dubbed UltraRope.

The article does note at the end that the development suggests that space elevators may be do-able:

Nor need carbon-fibre lift-cables be confined to buildings. They could eventually make an idea from science fiction a reality too. Space lifts, dreamed up in the late 1950s, are a way of getting into orbit without using a rocket. Building one would mean lowering a cable from a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit above the Earth’s equator while deploying a counterbalancing cable out into space. The cable from Earth to the satellite would not be a classic lift rope because it would not, itself, move. But it would perform a similar function of support as robotic cars crawled up and down it, ferrying people and equipment to and from the satellite—whence they could depart into the cosmos.

I'm guessing that the strength of this new cable has some way to go yet.

But as it happens, I was idly wondering recently about whatever happened to the idea of a "skyhook" system for helping get things into low earth orbit.  

I always thought the idea of space plane catching a ride up at the end of skyhook sounded like a good idea, and I wonder whether the strength of the Kone cable is enough for the job.   (Although a skyhook presumably needs to be rigid, not flexible like a lift cable.  I wonder if that is a problem?)

It does sound kinda stupid

Google's Project Loon to float the internet on balloons - tech - 18 June 2013 - New Scientist

I hadn't previously bothered reading the details of the Google trial of internet via balloon,  but now that I have, it's hard to imagine it working:

 Google will rely on weather prediction to keep its balloons in the right place, moving them up and down to take advantage of different air currents. "Project Loon uses software algorithms to determine where its balloons need to go, then moves each one into a layer of wind blowing in the right direction," Google announced. "By moving with the wind, the balloons can be arranged to form one large communications network."

An IT consultant also says it's a bit silly to think that access to the net will be of instant value to the poorest people of the world:

"It is a total myth to imagine a farmer in Mali using Google to find solutions for a disease his tomatoes have. Barriers are just huge: illiteracy, language, ICT training," Boyera says. The existing web is not that useful to the underprivileged populations of developing countries, and no amount of new connectivity options can fix that, he says.

Good point.

Day 10 of the prophecy that won't self fulfill despite everyone's best effort

Gee, isn't everyone getting sick of the media story that the Gillard leadership crisis is coming to a head, um, any day now.  The current countdown really got a kick along by Barrie Cassidy on Insiders the Sunday before last, and given that he is said to be close to the PM's partner Tim (well, they have often been seen at the footy together, I think the story goes,) I thought it might even have been some sort of authorised leak from the Lodge about Gillard re-considering her position.  This private theory of mine obviously had nothing to it, though.

Of course, the media is not entirely to blame:  but it is for continually repeating the musings of the line up of Labor politicians who want to have a cry on their shoulder about how Kevin is their only hope.

We also have left leaning academics to blame - John Quiggin, who has agitated for a Rudd return for a long time, and even the normally sensible Ken Parish is now advocating a completely cynical switch based on the theory that Rudd wouldn't win the House of Reps anyway, but would keep the Senate out of Coalition control, even though he really is a "treacherous turd" (Ken's own words) . 

I haven't seen the evening news on TV lately, but I've caught a bit of Question Time during the day, and Gillard has performed well.   She does not look like a leader who deserves to lose her position at all.

If only people of the Left would stop talking about the need for her to go, so that everything that happens in Federal politics is not being seen purely through that prism.   (Of course, this advice should have been followed for the last 2 years, as well.)

Things I don't understand about movies

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas Have a Strange Vision of the Future - DailyFinance

As this article notes, it was very odd hearing the creators of the Hollywood blockbuster mentality complaining about how it has sucked dry financing for other films.   (Spielberg had to look hard for financing for Lincoln, apparently, even though I would have thought it was one he could have paid for himself.  Lucas self financed his last film, which was a critical and commercial flop that seems to have not even been released internationally.  [Or if it has, I hadn't noticed.])

Anyhow, Hollywood financing and accounting has always been an enigma and famously shonky, and although I mentioned this before fairly recently, I still need someone to explain the following about the present situation:

1.  we used to hear that a huge cost of putting out a film was the print costs and distribution.   The US now has a large number of digital cinemas, so what has happened to all those costs savings?

2.  similarly, digital video cameras should surely represent a huge saving in film stock and processing.   Where did the savings go?

3.  digital video and cheap computer graphics processing should presumably also have dramatically cut the cost of special effects, and there was even that video going around the internet a couple of years ago showing how TV shows can basically use digital sets which presumably is much cheaper than going to a location. Where did the savings go?

On a separate note, on Friday night I watched the SBS sex movie that traditionally follows their Nazi documentary.   (Who started this long standing tradition at the station, I wonder.) 

This movie ("Lower City") was from Brazil, and the synopsis is here:

When prostitute Karinna accepts a ride to Bahia on Deco and Naldinho's cargo boat, sexual services are part of the arrangement.

Both men quickly become enamoured with her and seek the means to take her away from her life as a prostitute and pole dancer.

Set in the beautiful Bahia de San Salvador in Northern Brazil. 

It fitted the European (and Australian) School of Pointless Realism perfectly:   follow the events in the life of a few characters who are small time criminals and on a "life's losers" trajectory.   End the film by having them get into a fight, but with no resolution of the situation that has developed in the film whatsoever.  (The two guys both fell in love with her; the prostitute is pregnant with someone's baby, but it could be anyone's.  The guys beat each other up, she washes their blood in her room, and has a cry.  End credits.)  

I thought to myself:  I have been complaining about this style of narrative in art house film (let's set up a situation for the characters:  let's not attempt any resolution of any kind at all!) for decades.   I actually find it so cliche now that it is funny.      

The oceans rise up

Coastal cities and climate change: You’re going to get wet | The Economist

Here's a good, detailed article on the very serious issue of how expensive and difficult it will be for the US to deal with rising sea levels.